After a bit of a break I tried to get back into Shinji Mizushima’s Ikkyuu-san, but I think I’m going to end up dropping this series after all. Volume 4 and (most likely volumes 5-8 at the rate this is going) covers the winner-takes-all practice match between the first and second-string teams of Kyojin High School, but it’s just painful to read because Ikkyuu sucks so, so badly.
He himself might have an excuse for being so bad since his coach pretty much left him to his own devices, but there’s no reason why he still, after 4 volumes, doesn’t know many of the most basic rules of baseball like forced plays. And the coach puts him on third even though the poor soul can’t catch the most basic grounder — because you didn’t teach him, you idiot!!!!
What’s worse, even after it becomes clear that the opponents are aiming exclusively for Ikkyuu, the other team members don’t budge from their positions to help him out. There’s no law saying the shortstop or the left fielder or the whole team can’t move closer to third base to help Ikkyuu defend, is there? Instead they just stay where they are and whine and complain. The pitcher isn’t off the hook either, since he’s throwing balls that are so easy to hit that that the other guys got 10 runs in one inning without really trying. It doesn’t matter if Ikkyuu can’t catch if the enemy can’t hit your pitches, right?
So everybody sucks and I’m annoyed. At the end of the volume Ikkyuu FINALLY managed to catch something and the sides change, which was like PHEW! Obviously it’s going to turn out that this was all part of Coach Iwakaze’s master plan to awaken Ikkyuu’s true powers, blah blah blah, but it’s going to be a while before I return to Ikkyuu-san to find out what happens next. No wonder this series is so much shorter than Mizushima’s other stuff: it’s really, really frustrating!
This story is a simple depiction of the ordinary lives of the three Minami sisters. Please do not expect too much.
That’s the disclaimer in every episode of Minami-ke Tadaima, and the show is exactly what it says on the tin. Haruka, Kana and Chiaki wake up, eat, go to school, come home, eat, sleep and on and on through the episodes. It’s a great series for anyone who likes slice-of-life with relatively normal characters, but after four seasons maybe enough is enough?
Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed the show thoroughly, but the nature of most slice-of-life shows is that things will (almost) always reset to the status quo, so there’s rarely any development of note. Normally this isn’t a problem because such shows usually last only 13 to 26 episodes and end before you can get fed up, but Minami-ke is at double that number and counting. That means after 4 seasons things that were funny or interesting in the beginning now prompt a “That’s enough already!” reaction out of me. In particular:
– Hosaka is still fantasizing about Haruka yet still hasn’t managed to even talk to her properly yet.
– Fujioka is still failing to confess his love to Kana.
– Riko is still failing to confess her love to Fujioka.
– That annoying girl who is in love with Natsuki is still in love with him but can’t confess. Though we have learned that Natsuki has a bit of a crush on Haruka.
– Fujioka still doesn’t know that Touma is a girl.
– Makoto is still cross-dressing as Mako-chan… though I suppose Chiaki is slightly more friendly to boy Makoto now.
– Uncle Takeru is still coming over to mope… though he’s less of a mooch now.
So there have been slight developments, but for the most part everything is still the same as ever. That means fans of the series will get exactly what they were hoping for when they picked it up but it also means people like me who were getting just a bit tired of the formula last time will be a little disappointed. And even more so when they tease developments then take them away, like when they made it seem Haruka was into Natsuki, or that Fujioka and annoying-girl-who-likes-Natsuki would get together.
At least the show only added one new member to the cast (Miyuki. Or was she there all along?) but the cast is already plenty large, so I had to slog through a lot of skits that dealt with people I either don’t care for (the annoying girl that likes Natsuki, Atsuko and Maki), used to like but am now tired of (Hosaka, Makoto) or people I actively dislike (Natsuki, Hayami-sempai). I felt a little sad when the past three seasons ended but with Minami-ke Tadaima it’s just like, huh. Okay.
Of course I will still watch season 5 if and when it comes out, but the series is really stagnating now. If nothing changes after this then the next season will be my last.
I read Remember by Benjamin a few months ago. It was pretty bad, but I noticed in that many Amazon reviewers thought quite highly of his previous work Orange. And I figured Orange had to have done pretty well for Tokyopop for them to pick up another work by the same author (though I’m probably giving TP more credit than they deserve). Besides, Benjamin’s art is nice to look at regardless of the quality of his stories, so ah well, I decided to read it.
Blurb: Her name is Orange. She’s a young girl in high school, coming of age in the heart of the city. And she has decided she has nothing to lie for. Not her shallow friends, not her parents, not school. Not even the empty promises of love. Her head filled with morbid fantasies of suicide, Orange finds herself standing at the edge of her rooftop when the drunk, enigmatic young man, Dashu, enters her world…changing it forever.
A heartbreaking tale of a young woman desperately trying to understand the bewildering world around her, brought to life by the luscious artwork of global manga icon, Benjamin, Orange is a profoundly moving story of loss and redemption.
Aannnd… it’s not as bad as Remember, I guess. It helps that it’s really short, with the main story covering a little over 100 pages and the rest of the volume being taken up by Benjamin’s admittedly ‘luscious’ artwork. The guy can really draw when he puts his mind to it, no question about it.
It’s also not that bad because it has a definite focus – angsty teen pretends to be happy but is actually depressed and suicidal within, let’s see what happens to her. Of course you don’t ever get to find out, and it’s never made clear what the root cause behind Orange’s rebelliousness/lack of self-esteem/mental issues is, nor does anyone ever attempt to find out. It’s sad in a way, the way millions of depression sufferers slip through the cracks every year because they’ve mastered the art of putting on a mask of normality. As a reader I was just rolling my eyes as I read her endless whinging lines “Nobody understands me” (yes she really said that) “I’m in so much pain” and so on, but there are real life people going through that sort of thing so I suppose a tiny little bit of compassion is in order?
It might almost have been good if Benjamin hadn’t spoiled the shocker ending in the first few pages. I don’t really mind an open ending that gives you stuff to think about like “How did we get here?” and “What’s going to happen next?” but it has to be an ending, not given away right at the start so that the reader goes “Yeah yeah, just forward to the part where X happens.” Maybe in a longer story where enough happens during the flashback to make you forget that might work, but it’s a risky strategy that didn’t pay off for Benjamin IMO.
LOVE the bug eyes on the elf girl.
Should you read Orange by Benjamin? It only costs $0.50 used, but since it has like zero rereading value, I dunno. It’s just 100 pages of Orange whining and complaining, smoking and using bad language and making out with random guys in dark corners only to stop them from putting their hands in her underwear, and then every couple of pages Dashu shows up. I’m sure if you google for a few minutes you’ll find someone’s LiveJournal or Myspace (is that still a thing) with the same content.
The only real reason to get this would be the art. Benjamin’s artwork is gorgeous without a doubt, and it’s fun to read something in full color after all the manga I’ve been reading. Not that I don’t like manga or anything, but I love the use of vivid color in manhua. It’s such a pity more of it doesn’t come out in English because I was thrilled all those years ago when Image Comics published titles like Mega Dragon and Tiger and Solar Lord. I even bought some Mega Dragon volumes put out by an inferior publishing company, I forget their name. But I digress.
At the end of the volume for the last 30 pages or so are several pages of random artwork by Benjamin, a little extra bonus for the loyal fans who stuck this out. These look really nice, plus it’s nice to get an insight into the people who draw the art for the MMORPG ads you see everywhere when you don’t have Adblock on. I said last time that Benjamin would be better off just being an illustrator, and this just confirms it. I hope he’ll put out an artbook someday.
Yuup, you guessed it! Another baseball manga! I haven’t dropped Ikkyuu-san entirely, but volume 4 was rather boring, so I started something else on my list. I meant to just read a chapter or two for a change of pace, but before I knew it I’d finished the first two volumes of Gyakkyou Nine.
Gyakkyou = adversity. Nine = the nine members of the baseball team. This super hotblooded shounen manga is all about a baseball captain named Fukutsu Toshi (i.e. Indomitable Fighting Spirit) overcoming all kinds of far-fetched trials to keep his team intact and get them to Koshien. First he has to keep his team from disaster long enough so they can face the best team in the prefecture, then later on he has to study hard enough to avoid remedial classes… only to find out that most of his team didn’t pass the exams either… so now he needs to recruit a new team… and then he injures his arm… It just never ends.
Is it good? So far, it’s definitely amusing. In a trainwreck kind of “Just how bad can it get?!” situation. Everyone reacts in a completely over the top way to the least little problem, and it’s pretty funny somehow. That’s how exaggeration has to be – waaaay beyond the realm of reason, otherwise the reader starts trying to insert some logic into the situation, and then the whole thing falls apart. Kazuhiko Shimamoto avoids that by keeping the manga constantly moving along and making the problems flow thick and fast. At the end of volume 2 Toshi is in yet another pinch: his dream girl asked him out on a date… on the day of his match… and he accepted and ditched the game! How is he going to face his team now? Heh heh, this should be interesting to see.
Despite being a manga about a baseball team captain, Gyakkyou Nine isn’t really a baseball manga, so there isn’t much focus on the game itself. The team does some cursory practice once in a while, and we’ve been shown fragments of a game once or twice, but it’s a manga about a guy who just happens to play baseball, so the sport is just a way to introduce more drama into his life, nothing more. It could be a baseball or a boxing manga without losing much. Which is not to say I hold that against it. It’s a pretty fun and silly manga, and I’ll be taking a break from Ikkyuu-san to finish this off first since it’s only 6 volumes.
Another item knocked off my anime backlog, at least. First Barakamon, now Kotoura-san. If I keep dropping them this quickly, I’ll be done with the list in no time. But I don’t just drop series for the sake of dropping them. I am actively looking for new things to watch and enjoy, and it pains me, not least because of wasted time and bandwidth, when I have to drop things. However as with Barakamon I had my reasons, which I will now proceed to explain.
Reason 1 – One episode was enough. The premise is cute: Girl with power to read minds finds herself alienated from friends and family until she meets one boy who swears to stick by her no matter what. A budding romance begins. It was sweet, it was interesting, but it didn’t need to go beyond episode one because it’s a foregone conclusion how things are going to work out – assuming the opening theme didn’t spoil the romantic developments for you.
Reason 2 – It can’t decide what kind of show it wants to be. Does it want to be a high school romance? A tragic drama? A slapstick high school comedy? No, it wants to be all of the above, but it’s not particularly good at any of them. The romance would have been okay if Manabe didn’t blurt out his love for Kotoura right in episode 2. It was like, you what now? Because it’s easy to understand what Kotoura might see in him, but since when did he start liking her in a special way? What does he see in her? Isn’t he just falling in love with her because the plot demands it?!
The tragic drama part might have been okay as well if it wasn’t sandwiched between the romance slice-of-life and the stupid comedy. As it is, those scenes always seems to come out of nowhere and completely disrupt whatever mood you’ve got going on. You can’t relax and enjoy the show when there’s always some CRAAAAWLLLING IIIIN MY SKIIIIN waiting around the next corner. Especially since with the exception of Kotoura everyone else’s problems seem self-manufactured. Heck, even Kotoura should be old enough and wise enough to keep her mouth shut and hide her powers. Dummy. Reason 3 – Too much too soon. I already mentioned above how quickly Manabe fell in love with Kotoura and how weird that was. I wonder if things were rushed because it’s a 13-episode series. No idea how long the original manga is. But apart from the confession there’s also this drama with some guys beating up Manabe and Kotoura deciding “It’s all my fault, I have to disappear forever!” and stuff. And it’s only episode 3! Like, already? The characters have barely been established, the ESP club has barely started to know each other and you’re already dropping all this shoujo manga drama on my head? I couldn’t even bring myself to watch episode 4, I was just like ENOUGH.
Reason 4 – It’s rather vulgar. A large part of the so-called comedy in Kotoura-san consists of the male lead fantasizing about her in compromising positions, knowing that she can read his mind. So he’s always thinking stuff like this just to tease her:
First off, I don’t see anything comical about sexual harassment. It’s not like Kotoura welcomes those thoughts, since he specifically does it to discomfit her. I don’t see anything loving or romantic about it either. It’s just crude, vulgar and unwelcome. It made me dread every scene where Manabe showed up, because in addition to his thoughts, he just wouldn’t shut up about perverted stuff. 3 episodes of that was more than enough.
Roundup – Watch over your heart with all diligence, For from it flow the springs of life (Proverbs 4:23).
The further I get in my Christian walk, the stricter I am about the things I will and will not allow into my life. This especially applies to media and entertainment, which is mainly made by unbelievers for unbelievers. “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2), so even if the world says it’s perfectly okay to have a vulgar, foul-mouth, perverted protagonist or says that mentally undressing someone you claim to love is fine, I know better. That’s why Jesus said “You have heard that it was said, ‘YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY’; but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:27-28)
Even if everything else about Kotoura-san was above reproach I would probably have dropped it anyway because of Reason 4. The other reasons just made it easier to do so. Dropped without regrets, unless you count wishing I had just stopped after episode one.
had to have done pretty well for Tokyopop for them to pick up another work by the same author (though I’m probably giving TP more credit than they deserve). Besides, Benjamin’s art is nice to look at regardless of the quality of his stories, so ah well, I decided to read it.
